Universal Health Care already established in foreign countries: any benefits or negatives you would mention?
Question:
I've always heard that patients in countries with universal healthcare have to wait months for appointments with doctors. That it can take up to a year for surgeries because lack of funding. That doctors have to ration their time and see very few patients per day. Also, I've heard that governments ration drugs and do not release drugs to patients as frequently. Before watching the movie, I didn't realize that this wasn't always the case. I'm starting to see that this is what politicians wanted me to think.
Does anyone in these countries or any countries with universal healthcare have anything negative to say about their healthcare systems? Or since you have experienced universal healthcare, what do you think is the benefit of universal healthcare?
Answers:
I have not lived in a country that offered universal health care for their people but I just wanted to say that I think it is ridiculous that we have not tried this approach in America. The fact that there are millions of people without healthcare or have healthcare but are unable to get the treatment and medications that are necessary is shameful. The private sector fat cats have made an obscene amount of money off of the American public by denying healthcare and medications to its members. Why are we allowing this to continue?
Universal healthcare would cover every individual in the U.S. for less than the administrative costs that are currently being expended in order support all of the paper work and red tape that is required by private sector health care.
We are one of the wealthiest and most prosperous countries in the world and yet we have one of the worst healthcare systems in the world. Government officials want to continue privatized healthcare because they are being paid off to keep it running. We need to stop listening to their buzz words "communist", "big brother", "socialism" and recognize that this is a system that would benefit all.
Availability and quality of doctors. Less pay for doctors meaning less incentive to learn and better their practices. Less desirability to become doctors due to less pay , and high potential legal fees.
I live in the US but did live on the Canadian boarder. I can tell you that the Dr office's and hospitals on the US side where full of Canadian citizens getting heath care that they could not receive, or wait for in their universal Canadian Government run heath care system. Besides, do you think that the US government, with all of its current issues, could efficiently run a health care system? The closest the U.S. has is the Veterans Affairs administration and its leader just got replaced for mis-management. Being a Vet and dealing with the VA ineptness is not something that I would choose to do with all the heath care in the country. One last thing I promise...Michael Moore is a complete anti-American, and a huge moron.
I dont think universal health care is the answer. Insurance companies need to get out of the medical business and quit telling MD what they can and cannot do. They run healthcare.
I was W. Germany during the zenith of the Cold War, about 35 yr ago. W. Germany had universal health care then.
I worked for some volunteer org. The org. gave me a pad of chits to use for medical/dental visits. I made very few, almost none.
However, an American couple I knew, also with a volunteer org., went to the dentist for a checkup, which we do, if so inclined & so insured, with some regularity in the US of A. German dentist was disappointed: looked @their teeth & determined they were OK. Wanted to know why they visited a dentist when nothing was the matter. Did not understand the concept of "checkup."
Universal health care is fine when you're near death; otherwise, it serves the healthy not @all: preventive medicine is an unknown quantity. I worked in a home for people severely disabled. There is a fine, vast network for people injured on the job; however, there is little notion of on-the-job safety.
Visit any port in the US of A, & you'll find people in hardhats & safety shoes. I remember in the port of Naples, dock workers ran around in sandals & seemed oblivious to heavy machinery. Seems that where there's an emphasis on universal health care, there's a deemphasis on safety.
There is little doubt that the U.S. health care system is a shambles: with the deregulation of the past 25 yr, insurance companies have more leverage in making medical decisions. There is plenty of evidence that the manner in which drugs reach public availability is notoriously corrupt.
We might easily improve health care in the US of A if we were to decrease corruption, rather than just heaving the whole system into the hands of federal regulators that, for the most part, come from the ranks of the corrupt private medical services. (We certainly have seen the opposite in the privatization of prisons & detention centers: notorious corruption by people from the ranks of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons.) Whenever we provide a blanket solution for problems, whether by privatizing or federalizing, corruption soon follows, when people can easily elude poorly enforced rules & regulations. @Some point, we always seem to give up on both, & let things, as we say, "play out."
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